In the morning I rang my youngest.
“Mum? What’s happened?”
“Dov. Could you run me up to the hospital? I think it’s time I found out what this is.”
He was at my door in nineteen minutes.
And when I opened that door and he saw me standing in my own hall in a dressing gown, I watched my fifty-six-year-old son’s face do something he did not manage to get hold of in time.
“Mum. Why didn’t you tell me it had got like this?”
“I didn’t want anybody making a fuss.”
And he put his hand on my shoulder and said: “That’s the entire job, Mum.”
At Ardenne General I was seen by a consultant called Dr. Henrike Opoku.
She is about forty-seven.
She took a full history. She examined me properly and told me what she was doing before she did it.
And she did not once, in forty minutes, talk to my son over the top of my head — which I noticed at the time and which I have since told her I noticed.
